Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
The colorful artwork alone makes ‘Little Amélie or the Character of Rain’ an animated film worth watching. And if you’d like a comparison: it’s a lot more visually pleasing than the 2024 film ‘Flow‘.
Directed by Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang and Maïlys Vallade, the animated film is narrated by Amélie (Loïse Charpentier), a baby who is in a vegetative state at the time of her birth. Born to Belgian parents living in Japan, Amélie remains vegetative until something changes and she suddenly starts to talk and move. An absolute monster of a child, she keeps her parents, who already have two playful children, on their toes. Dad Patrick is a diplomat and mom Daniele is a pianist, so they hire Nishio-san, a young Japanese woman, to help out, and a strong bond soon grows between her and the imaginative Amélie.
Little Amélie thinks she is God but is disappointed to discover that she cannot control everything around her. In one comical scene, when she attempts to communicate with her parents for the first time, she becomes frustrated that her utterances are nothing but gibberish. Her parents and siblings, however, are simply delighted to hear her voice. But Amelie brings the house down with her wailing.
‘God’s body is a prison,’ Amélie declares to the viewer. The film is a whimsical yet relatable take on how the world appears to a toddler. Everything is new and wondrous to Amélie, with the garden around her family home becoming something like her own private kingdom. The hand-drawn animation, with its vibrant colors is very engaging, and beautifully captures the Japanese landscape, especially the family home with its traditional wooden sliding doors and its quaint surroundings.
The villain in the tale? The family’s grumpy landlady, Kashima-san, who views them as outsiders and disapproves of Nishio’s fondness for the kids. For me, Kashima’s exaggerated hostility towards the foreigners, rooted in the war and Japan’s history, feels a little out of place. After all, why rent your home to a Belgian diplomat and his family if you dislike Caucasians that much? Then again, perhaps good rent can overcome even decades of resentment.
More importantly, Kashima-san serves as a foil to Nishio. Both women have lost family to war, and both have reason to carry resentment towards foreigners. Yet, while Kashima chooses to hold on to that bitterness, Nishio forms a beautiful bond with little Amélie, recognizing that a toddler bears no responsibility for the wars, politics or racial prejudices of the generations before her. In little Amélie, Nishio finds a fleeting sense of family again, made bittersweet by the knowledge that it cannot last.
In one of the more poignant scenes in ‘Little Amélie or the Character of Rain’, and one that might be lost on younger viewers, Patrick takes the family on a beach day while Nishio is left behind. Amélie, however, brings her back a seemingly empty jar, which immediately makes Nishio emotional. My teen cousin didn’t understand why, so I had to explain that Amélie has essentially brought her a jarful of sea air: when Nishio opens it, she can smell the ocean, evoking memories of happier days spent at the beach with her own family.
Most of the film is seen through Amélie’s exaggerated, childlike lens, so there are scenes that appear magical but really aren’t. And that’s the thing about this animated story: while some of it is metaphorical, it is ultimately an innocent tale of a toddler discovering the world and learning to be human. It’s comically cute how after little Amélie realizes she might not be God, she thinks she is Japanese, obviously a relatable way of showing how children think.
The animation is stunning despite its simplicity, and while the leisurely pace can be slightly challenging (even though it’s not even 90 minutes long), there’s something undeniably charming about seeing the world through Amélie’s eyes. I’m not sure I’ll remember much of the story a few years from now, but it was a fun little world to inhabit for its runtime, and a lovely one-time watch.
Watch Little Amélie or the Character of Rain on Prime Video.
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